Lewis Tappan to Frederick Douglass, December 6, 1856
Brooklyn, N.Y. 6 Dec[ember] 1856.
TO FREDERICK DOUGLASS, ESQ.
MY DEAR SIR,
I do not know whether the lady to whom the enclosed note is addressed as Mrs or lady. You will at once see the propriety of the course I suggest. So many calls are made upon me that I must adopt such a rule.
I have rec’d the copy of your paper of 17th Oct & thank you for it. Somehow it escaped my notice—in Oct. Probably I was about or the paper did not come. My attention has been called to the Resolutions proposed by you at Syracuse.*1At the fifth annual Jerry Rescue Celebration in Syracuse, New York, Douglass brought four resolutions before the meeting in a speech condemning slavery. In an appeal to the religion and morality of slave owners, Douglass intimated that God would inflict “terrible penalties” on slave owners, as he had on all “oppressors of people.” He further stated, “We would rejoice in a successful slave insurrection.” In one of the blunter resolutions, Douglass argued, “In killing a slave owner to secure freedom, the slave is guilty of no crime.” Though the resolutions appeared to condone violence and slave insurrection, Douglass directed his comments at slave owners as a warning, instead of at slaves. He sought to demonstrate the danger of owning slaves by relating the fates of slave owners in past insurrections in other parts of the world. , 19 December 1856. [B]y an English Correspondent. All I can do, in this free country, is to express an honest opinion. Your right to offer such circulations & to publish such a paper as you choose cannot justly be questioned. All who believe it would be right in a white man to use the means for obtaining his liberty: that you recommend ought not to object to a colored man using the same means. Those means in either case are abhorrent to my mind & heart. I am truly sorry you cherish such sentiments. “Vengeance is mine &c.”2Rom. 12:19. Then at sweet peace [illegible] [illegible] do good. [Let us] [illegible] the [illegible] of the spirit & all will be well. [illegible] [illegible] [illegible] enslaved & the case & defense of the God.
Truly yours
LEWIS TAPPAN.
ALS: Lewis Tappan Papers, DLC.
200 LEWIS TAPPAN TO DOUGLASS, 6 DECEMBER 1856
1.
2.
FREDERICK DOUGLASS TO JOHN BROWN
[n.p.] 7 Dec[ember] 1856.1
My DEAR CAPTAIN BROWN.2—
I am very busy at home. Will you please come up with my son Fred,3 and
take a mouthful with me?
In haste yours, truly,
FRED. DOUGLASS.
ALS: Dreer Collection, PHi
1. Although Douglass supplied no year in dating this letter, John Brown was known to have
passed through Rochester in December 1856 while traveling east from Kansas to raise funds in New
York and New England. Franklin B. Sanborn, ed., The Life and Letters of John Brown: Liberator
of Kansas and Martyr of Virginia, 2d. ed. (Boston 1891), 341, 443; Oates, To Purge This Land, 224;
Villard, John Brown, 270, 674.
2. John Brown.
3. Born in Lynn, Massachusetts, Frederick Douglass, Jr. (1842-92) was the second son of Fred-
erick and Anna Murray Douglass. Like his brothers, he was educated in Rochester’s public schools
and learned the printer’s trade while assisting his father in the newspaper office. Unlike his broth-
ers Lewis and Charles, however, Frederick Jr. did not enlist in the Union army. Instead, he acted as
a recruiting agent for the Fifty-fourth and Fifty-fifth Massachusetts Infantry regiments. After the
Civil War, Frederick Jr. tried but failed to gain membership in the typographical worker’s union in
Washington, D.C. In 1866 he joined his brother Lewis in Denver, Colorado, and began working in
the offices of the Red, White, and Blue Mining Company. While in Denver, Frederick Jr. received
additional training as a typographer from his father’s old friend Henry O. Wagoner. He returned to
Washington, D.C., in 1868, but racial prejudice again made it difficult for him to gain membership
in the union. In 1870, Frederick Jr. joined his father at the New National Era, serving as the news-
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